(_b_) POLITICAL.--Statecraft has played an important part in determining the order and pace of industrial progress. The possession of numerous colonies and other political attachments in different parts of the world, comprising a large variety of material resources, gave to England, and in a less measure to France, Holland, Spain, a great advantage. The tyrannical use these nations made of their colonies for the purpose of building up home manufactures enabled them to specialise more widely and safely in those industries to which the new methods of production were first applied. Even after the North American colonies broke loose, the policy of repression England had applied to their budding manufactures enabled her to retain to a large extent the markets thus created for her manufactured goods.
The large annexations England made during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries gave her a monopoly of many of the finest markets for the purchase of raw materials and for the sale of manufactured goods. The large demand thus established for her textile and metal wares served not only to stimulate fresh inventions, but enabled her to utilise many improvements which could only be profitably applied in the case of large industries with secure and expanding markets.
But the most important factor determining the priority of England was the political condition of continental Europe at the very period when the new machinery and motor-power were beginning to establish confidence in the new industrial order. When Crompton's mule, Cartwright's power-loom, Watt's engines were transforming the industry of England, her continental rivals had all their energies absorbed in wars and political revolutions. The United States and Sweden were the only commercial nations of any significance who, being neutral, obtained a large direct gain from the European strife. Yet England, in spite of the immense drain of blood and money she sustained, under the momentum of the new motor-power far outstripped the rivalry of such states. Though she had to pay a heavy price for her immunity from invasion, she thereby secured an immense start in the race of modern machine-production. Until 1820 she had the game in her own hands. In European trade she had a practical monopoly of the rapidly advancing cotton industry. It was this monopoly which, ruthlessly applied to maintain prices at a highly remunerative rate, and to keep down wages to starvation point, built up, in an age of supreme and almost universal misery for the masses, the rapid and colossal fortunes of the cotton kings. Not until peace was established did the textile and other factories begin to take shape upon the Continent, and many years elapsed before they were able to compete effectively with England. Switzerland was the first continental country to actively adopt the new methods. The large supply of water-power stood her in good stead, and the people took more willingly to the factory system than in other countries.[87] France was slower in her development, in spite of the strong protective system by which she strove, though not very successfully, to exclude English cotton goods. The fall of English prices and profits in the cotton trade between 1820 and 1830 marks clearly the breakdown of the English monopoly before the cheap labour of Alsace and the cheap raw material of the United States, now organised in the factory system with the new machinery.[88] In this, the most advanced trade, the world-competition which now is operative in a thousand different industries, measuring and levelling economic advantages, first clearly shows itself, and in 1836 Ure finds the continental nations and America competing successfully with England in markets which had hitherto been entirely her own.